The Plan B call: Politics vs. science

Was there science, and not just politics, behind the Obama administration’s decision to stop young teens from getting the morning-after pill without a prescription? Probably not.

Will it work as a political decision? That’s trickier — because for every independent voter who is reassured that President Barack Obama doesn’t want 12-year-old girls buying emergency contraception, there may be another one who thinks he ignores science for political gain.

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That’s not exactly the slam-dunk Obama is looking for — especially when his base, after a year of budget cuts and deficit talks, already thinks he gives too much away to Republicans.

“It’s harder when you have to talk about how this decision makes any kind of sense, because frankly, I’m not sure it does,” said Elizabeth Shipp, the political director of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

It wasn’t just Democrats and abortion rights groups that howled when HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the FDA on Wednesday and declared that Plan B shouldn’t be available over the counter to girls under age 17. It was medical groups, too — because in their view, the evidence is already settled that the emergency contraception is safe and effective, regardless of age.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the Society of Adolescent Health and Medicine all blasted the decision. And Susan Wood, who resigned as director of the FDA’s Office of Women’s Health in the George W. Bush administration because of delays in the approval of Plan B, said the Sebelius decision was “very reminiscent” of the case the Bush administration made against the drug.

“This was a poster child of an issue of science being trumped,” said Wood, now the executive director of the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health at the George Washington University. “It’s very distressing.”

If Sebelius’s decision was political, though, she’ll have plenty of defenders. Unlike the FDA, she has to take political blowback into account — and no matter what the science says, there were sure to be voters who don’t think it’s smart to make it easy for young teens to buy emergency contraception.

“She’s been nothing but transparent here — she simply disagrees that allowing girls under 17 to purchase this hormonal drug over the counter without the supervision of an adult or doctor is the right course of action,” said Lanae Erickson, deputy director of the social policy and politics program at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank.

In her letter Wednesday to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, Sebelius said she blocked the FDA’s recommendation for over-the-counter sales to young teens because the studies submitted to the agency “do not include data on all ages” and because “it is commonly understood that there are significant cognitive and behavioral differences between older adolescent girls and the youngest girls of reproductive age.”